Mobile devices such as GPS systems include a GPS circuit for determining the location of the mobile device. Location information from a GPS circuit has been used to provide navigation data to mobile devices. GPS data has also been used to trigger events such as setting off alarms or reminders on a user's mobile device when the device enters proximity to a particular location, to add data to images taken by a mobile device, and to provide data to a remote server to track the mobile device.
Some GPS systems also include a compass to determine the orientation of the mobile device. The output of the compass may be used for various navigation functions such as displaying the direction of travel of the mobile device to a user, assisting the GPS circuit in providing positioning data (e.g. when the global positioning satellites are not visible such as in a tunnel—sometimes referred to as dead reckoning), and/or orienting the display of route data in a navigation application so that the route is displayed in the same perspective as the user's view of the streets.
Mobile devices such as smartphones are becoming capable of performing a large number of functions. These phones tend to be loaded with a large number of software applications for performing these different functions. A difficulty arises in making these applications easy for a user to access and use. To address this difficulty, smartphones will sometimes include shortcuts to commonly used applications, and may allow a user to choose which shortcuts to display. The shortcuts may be displayed on a main screen of the smartphone (e.g. a phone dialing application, a calendar application, an Internet search application, a wireless transceiver power-on/off application, etc.), and/or may be displayed as part of a menu that is quickly accessible from the main (and/or any other) screen of the smartphone (e.g. a quick start menu). Smartphones may also include reconfigurable buttons that allow a user to quickly access common commands. These commands may be application-specific (i.e. they vary from application to application) or may be common to all applications (e.g. a button configured by the user to be dedicated to launching a particular software application).
Options still have not been developed for using orientation and/or location data in different ways and options still have not been developed for additional ways to make mobile devices such as smartphones and GPS devices easier to use.